The man motioned towards the door of the hut, but he remained outside as Tracey entered and shut it carefully behind him. The man behind the desk inside the shed was as alert and watchful as he was, but he had affected the trappings of respectability. He was probably from Jamaica, in Steve’s view. He wore a three-piece suit, with a thin gold watch-chain stretched across his bulging chest. He clasped his well-manicured hands in front of him, as if anxious to show off his perfect nails to the man instructed to sit on the other side of the desk. Steve wondered if he would complete the parody by lighting a cigar, but he merely sat back and looked at the new arrival with a smile, relishing the situation.
He was a strange figure in a strange environment. Apart from his colour, he was a caricature of a nineteenth-century industrial baron in this dingy twenty-first-century setting. There was a chart on the wall with what seemed to be a plan of foundations for the buildings to be erected here. It had words scribbled across it which were illegible from where Steve Tracey sat. Lumps of drying mud from people’s boots littered the floor; a week-old tabloid newspaper lay in the corner of the shed. There was something ludicrous about the overdressed central figure which gave Tracey a sudden, unexpected spurt of confidence.
It wasn’t the big boss, as those idiots outside had said it would be. It was their boss, the man in charge of security for some organisation. A big concern, by the look of it. A well-organised business: this was a suitably anonymous place for a meet, whatever the dress affectations of the man conducting it. Tracey sat motionless and waited; he wasn’t going to let the man with the watch-chain know that he was nervous.
The man sat back, steepled his fingers, continued his impersonation of a different kind of executive. ‘Well, Mr Tracey. So your boss is dead. And your job was to protect him. Didn’t do a very good job there, did you?’
‘I offered to stay with him on Monday night. He said it wasn’t necessary.’
‘You didn’t kill him yourself, did you, Steve?’
‘Of course I didn’t! He’d be alive now if he’d allowed me to stay with him when he went outside Claughton Towers on Monday night.’
Watch-chain smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that. You might have been dead meat yourself, Steve, instead of enjoying this conversation. You don’t mind me calling you Steve, do you?’
‘You can call me what you like. You’re in the box seat. You and your gorillas outside.’
‘Box seat. Yes, I suppose that’s so.’ He smiled contentedly, his teeth looking very large and very white in this ill-lit place. ‘But I have good news for you, Steve. I have been empowered to offer you employment. Generous thinking, that, after you failed in your last assignment. But then I work for a generous man.’
‘Lennon.’ Steve had been thinking furiously, trying to work out who could be behind his virtual kidnap.
Watch-chain looked a little surprised, even for a moment discomfited. ‘Best not to speculate at this stage, Steve. But I suppose you have a right to know who’ll be paying your wages. So yes, Mr Lennon. He’s prepared to take you on. He’s taking over most of your organisation following the unfortunate demise of James O’Connor. And he wants as smooth a transition as possible. So he’s prepared to take on you and whichever two of your staff you recommend. You’d be deputy to me, of course.’ He ran his hand lightly over the front of his waistcoat, fingering the watch-chain as if it offered him reassurance. ‘But you’d be second in line in our security department. It’s a very generous offer, if you ask me.’
Steve wanted to say that he didn’t ask him, that he’d had quite enough of this patronising nonsense. But this fellow was making a generous offer on behalf of his employer, offering a job to a rival in the same trade of violence. He was going to have to work with the Jamaican. If the man was vain enough to indulge in silly charades like this, he might even take over from him, in due course.
Tracey took a deep breath and stood up. There was no possibility of refusal. He knew too much about the empire of James O’Connor for that. If he opted out of work for the new ownership, he might well be eliminated. He thrust out his hand and said, ‘I accept, subject to proper remuneration. I’m sure I can rely on Mr Lennon for that.’
The man in the waistcoat winced again at Tracey’s mention of that name. He had planned to reveal it himself at this stage to this man who would operate in his shadow. But he stood up and thrust his hand forward. ‘Peter Coleman. Here’s to a long and successful working relationship.’
Middle management making a new appointment. Steve completed the bizarre playlet by shaking the big hand firmly, then closing his left hand over the right as the two big men came together. He wondered how many victims these hands had dispatched in the last ten years.
FIVE
There had been a mill here once. It had been built in bright-red brick, with a square tower at one end, like that of a great church. A chimney had risen high at the other, dwarfing everything else around. The long terraces of low houses had been built in meaner brick, but they had been homes to many hundreds of people. The streets here had once reverberated with the sound of clogs clattering to work, hastening to beat the morning whistle at the factory gates, to shut their wearers in with the greater clatter of the steam-driven machines within the smooth brick walls.
All that was long gone. Percy Peach didn’t remember it, but he’d seen pictures and been instructed in his primary school on the proud industrial heritage of the area. Manchester had been not only the workshop of the world but also Cottonopolis, and Brunton had been one of the great cotton-spinning towns. Now all was changed, changed utterly. That expression came back to Percy from some point in his chequered school career.
The area was now part of an industrial estate. There were bright new buildings with big windows. Volkswagens and Audis and Toyotas dominated the car parks, as if to remind people that the world had moved on. The headquarters of O’Connor Industries was a surprisingly small building near the entrance to the estate. It had ample parking and a much more impressive entrance than any of the utilitarian buildings which predominated here. Dark red wooden doors opened between a pair of high granite pillars, a style determinedly out of fashion with more muted modern styles.
Jan Derkson rose automatically to greet them, as she had greeted so many hundreds of visitors here before. She said, ‘We can go through into Mr O’Connor’s room if you like. We won’t be disturbed there.’
‘Then let’s go there. We certainly don’t want to be disturbed,’ said the bald-headed man in the trim grey suit. ‘I’m DCI Peach and this is Detective Sergeant Northcott.’
It didn’t feel right to Jan to be taking this room over. She realised now that she had always adopted a deferential air when she brought in the boss’s visitors. Now she forced herself to take charge, inviting the very tall black man to sit in one of the two luxurious armchairs, seating herself carefully on the edge of the matching but smaller armchair alongside him. She invited Peach to take the swivel chair behind the big desk, but he declined and came and sat in the armchair which matched Northcott’s and was directly opposite to her.
He smiled briefly and she felt him assessing her, with his head tilted fractionally to one side. It wasn’t the sort of sexual review to which she had accustomed herself and learned to deal with over the years, but rather a cool estimation of her usefulness, of how much she might be able and willing to give them in the way of information. She found it disconcerting. It felt as if she was being interviewed without warning for a job, as she had not been for many years now.